https://againstconfusion.substack.com/p/this-is-power-working-as-intended?ref=forever-wars.com
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You get a jaywalking ticket.
Small thing. You pay it or you contest it. It feels administrative—paperwork, friction, a mild annoyance dressed up as civic order. But let’s say you forget to pay it. Or, better, refuse to pay it. Let’s trace the refusal in fast forward.
Refuse to pay. Refuse to appear. Refuse to comply. Eventually, men with guns arrive at your door.
This is not me trying to be melodramatic. This is the fundamental assumption, the background operating system, of contemporary society. Every law, every “no smoking” sign, every “keep off the grass” works because, at the end of the sequence, the state can legally harm you. The state is the entity that successfully claims the monopoly on violence.
“Legitimate” is just what we call social structures built on a monopoly of violence we’ve collectively decided to emotionally and intellectually suppress. It’s the narrative frame that turns brute force into smooth running order.
The Exception
At its core, politics is not the art of persuasion. Discourse may unfold at the level of rhetorical debate, but this covers over the heart of what political disputes over power really are: a negotiation over who gets to wield force—when, and against whom. Every legal system has a trapdoor: an emergency clause, a “state of necessity,” a moment where procedure yields to power. In those moments, the law doesn’t decide. Someone does.
The legal theorist Carl Schmitt famously argued that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”. This logic remains the most honest map of how power actually functions. For Schmitt, the “norm”—the everyday rule of law—tells us nothing about the reality of power. The norm only functions when things are peaceful. But when a crisis hits, the law goes silent. In that silence, the Sovereign speaks.
We pretend the exception is rare. But modern governance treats the exception like a permanent setting. As described by Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman in “Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System,” we are moving toward a “neo-royalist” order where personalized rule and “extra-legal” sovereignty displace rational bureaucracies (h/t Mark Rukman). In this world, we see a return to an international system structured by hyper-elites.
It is here that the full weight of Schmitt’s legacy lands. It could be easy to see the logic of the “Decision” as a necessary (if unpleasant to ponder) tool for order until you remember that Schmitt was the “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich”. He didn’t just study the exception; he helped build a world where the exception swallowed the rule entirely.
Sovereignty Made Visible
A few weeks ago, the U.S. military took Nicolás Maduro from Caracas and flew him to New York. Call it an arrest. Call it an abduction. The label is an afterthought. Originally the justification was drug trafficking—a pretense the Justice Department quickly dropped for a charge involving machine guns.
If this feels nonsensical, you’re right. There’s no longer an attempt to mask the violence behind a narrative to sell legitimacy. This is a Schmittian Decision in its purest form: the Sovereign proves he is outside the legal order precisely so he can redefine it. As Goddard and Newman observe, the current administration operates on the principle that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law”.
The Daily Practice
What Caracas shows as a rupture, immigration enforcement shows as a routine. Once designated “illegal,” a person exits the law’s protection. This is what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben called “Bare Life.” Agamben took Schmitt’s “exception” and brought it down to the level of the human body. He describes the Homo Sacer—a person stripped of their political existence and reduced to their biological body.
“Expedited removal” is the architecture of this exception: speed over process, administrative convenience over human rights. On January 7, 2026, Renée Good—a U.S. citizen—was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. The response followed the taxonomy of power: the Executive claimed “what you see is what you get,” while federal agencies refused to cooperate with state investigators.
In the eyes of the state, Good was moved into a “zone of indistinction.” When ICE agents tell protesters today that they “don’t want to end up like Renée Good,” they are confirming that in the current moment, they are no longer citizens with rights, but Bare Life in the path of a Decision.
The New Shape of the Exception
It’s easy for those of us who are armchair students of history to wish cast and convince ourselves that “Westphalia returning”—strong states, hard borders. But the pattern looks more like sovereignty getting more personal. Less institution. More court. More clique.
As Goddard and Newman argue, this emerging neo-royalist order centers on “ruling cliques, networks of political, capital, and military elites devoted to individual sovereigns”. We are witnessing the collapse of “The Office” and the return of “The Person”.
This is the ultimate evolution of Agamben’s theory. It isn’t just individuals who can be reduced to bare life; entire sectors of the economy can be stripped of their legal status. If you are Nvidia or Denmark, the “Rules-Based Order” no longer exists to protect you. You have been moved outside the norm. You must offer tribute to avoid the “state of necessity” being declared against your chips or your borders.
The goal of this rent extraction is not simply self-enrichment, but to “amass wealth from both the domestic and international peripheries so as to perpetuate and extend clique political dominance”.
Qatar gifts the president a “flying palace”. Vietnam fast-tracks a Trump Organization real estate deal. Nvidia tithes 15% of revenue for tariff exemptions. The line between state and clique dissolves. We aren’t in a liberal democracy; we are in a Schmittian Court. What Goddard and Newman call “neo-royalism” is an international system where a small group of hyper-elites use modern economic interdependencies to “extract material and status resources for themselves”.
Working as Intended
The logic of power is fractal. What happens to someone seeking a pardon happens to Nvidia. The same thing happens to a foreign country seeking sanctions relief. The same thing happens to Renée Good. They all exist outside the norm the moment the Sovereign decides they do. The difference is only the magnitude of the tribute required—and whether you can pay it.
In neo-royalism, there are no civilians. There are those inside the clique, and those who exist as resource pools—potential marks to shakedown, or be disposed of. Renée Good was reclassified the moment she got on the wrong side of Jonathan Ross. Jonathan Ross was not just an individual making a choice. He was the clique’s enforcement arm. He was the state of exception itself pulling the trigger.
Renée Good said, “I’m not mad at you.” The state killed her anyway.
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